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Still more unreasonably:
There are men, bound to human bodies and subject to desire,
grief, anger, who think so generously of their own faculty that
they declare themselves in contact with the Intelligible World,
but deny that the sun possesses a similar faculty less subject to
influence, to disorder, to change; they deny that it is any wiser
than we, the late born, hindered by so many cheats on the way
towards truth.
Their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare
deathless, divine; but the entire heavens and the stars within
the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal Principle,
though these are far purer and lovelier than their own souls- yet
they are not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the
discipline prevailing in the heavens, since they are the loudest
in complaint of the disorder that troubles our earth. We are to
imagine the deathless Soul choosing of design the less worthy
place, and preferring to abandon the nobler to the Soul that is
to die.
Equally unreasonable is their introduction of that other Soul
which they piece together from the elements.
How could any form or degree of life come about by a blend of the
elements? Their conjunction could produce only a warm or cold or
an intermediate substance, something dry or wet or intermediate.
Besides, how could such a soul be a bond holding the four
elements together when it is a later thing and rises from them?
And this element- soul is described as possessing consciousness
and will and the rest- what can we think?
Furthermore, these teachers, in their contempt for this creation
and this earth, proclaim that another earth has been made for
them into which they are to enter when they depart. Now this new
earth is the Reason-Form [the Logos] of our world. Why should
they desire to live in the archetype of a world abhorrent to
them?
Then again, what is the origin of that pattern world? It would
appear, from the theory, that the Maker had already declined
towards the things of this sphere before that pattern came into
being.
Now let us suppose the Maker craving to construct such an
Intermediate World- though what motive could He have?- in
addition to the Intellectual world which He eternally possesses.
If He made the mid-world first, what end was it to serve?
To be a dwelling-place for Souls?
How then did they ever fall from it? It exists in vain.
If He made it later than this world- abstracting the formal-idea
of this world and leaving the Matter out- the Souls that have
come to know that intermediate sphere would have experienced
enough to keep them from entering this. If the meaning is simply
that Souls exhibit the Ideal-Form of the Universe, what is there
distinctive in the teaching?
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